By Scott Ross
If ever a movie was of its time, it was this one; not only was it one of the last important pictures of the extended 1970s era (essentially 1967—1982) but arguably the last with an unabashedly excoriating political viewpoint made within the American studio system. I remember vividly how angry it made me when I saw it in the theater and how its revelations concerning the murderousness of what I now think of as the permanent unelected American government (est., 22 November 1963) made me realize that the political cynicism I had operated under after Nixon’s resignation was merely fashionably decorative; although Reagan’s embrace of the psychotic, mass-murdering “Contras” in Nicaragua, spiritual heirs of the Chilean death-squads of 1973, had perhaps primed me for the rage I felt as I left the theater, seeing Missing was the moment the scales really fell from my eyes and I recognized that I had not been nearly cynical enough. This Damascan Road moment is perhaps understandable, given the one-sidedness of the “news” we were permitted even then to see and to read of the world and America’s actions within and against much of it and which I grant you was still less pernicious than what is on view today. In those days, after all, National Public Radio was not merely a reliable source of unbiased reporting but the model of it, at least in this country. How quaint that notion seems now.
Like the book (Thomas Hauser’s The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice) on which it was based, Missing details less young Horman’s arrest, torture and murder at the hands of Pinochet’s goons (we never see the violence) than the agonized, and agonizing, attempts by his wife and father to discover his whereabouts following the Kissinger-directed/CIA-sponsored coup that, as is America’s wont, deposed the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with a (to use the Permanent Government’s favorite ironic phrase) brutal dictator whose military then rounded up and slaughtered thousands of citizens without trial… and all because Henry Kissinger could not countenance a Socialist government anywhere in the Americas. Despite the attempts of the United States’ embassy in Chile to paint him as a radical agitator in order to justify his killing, Charles Horman’s only crime appears to have been that some American officials and military officers couldn’t keep their yaps shut — that they were too proud of their role in the coup to refrain from boasting about it in front of a young American journalist. That his wife (Joyce in reality, “Beth” in the movie) and friend Terry Simon were not also eliminated appears to have been either an oversight or the sheer luck of their not being in the Horman’s home when Charles was picked up by military forces.
Like Hauser’s book, Missing does not prove (as Charles’ father Ed came to believe, with cause) that U.S. officials, in addition to covering up for the Chilean military, most likely ordered his murder, but comes as close as its makers dared without concrete evidence. It certainly came too close for comfort for several of the Americans involved, who brought suit against the director and co-scenarist (Constantin) Costa-Gavras and MCA, the parent company of Universal Pictures. (They’d ignored the book, which was small potatoes; a big Hollywood-produced motion picture that might be seen by millions around the world was another matter entirely.) A separate suit was filed against Hauser, and was dismissed, as was the action against Costa-Gavras and MCA. In a sane world, however, the suits should have opened the door to the arrest and prosecutions of the plaintiffs, who included the former ambassador Nathaniel Davis, none of whom ever had to face justice for their complicity in the murder of an American citizen. Kissinger, of course, never paid for any of his crimes of mass-murder, either in Chile, Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, Laos or Cambodia and died at over 100, venerated by hawks and doves alike in the political duopoly Gore Vidal called the Property Party but which we now know best as the War Party. It may seem strange to some to be so moved by the murder, 50 years in the past, of a young man and by extension its cinematic depiction more than 40 years ago, but Hauser’s description of what were undoubtedly the last few days of Charles Horman’s life (and the execution as well of his friend and colleague Frank Teruggi, which the U.S. embassy continued to deny even in the face of evidence to the contrary) is heart-rending, as is recognizing the full measure of the Hormans’ uncomprehending grief and anger at what their government has done to them, which the movie also captures. Charles Horman’s death matters because, one or 1 million, every death matters to someone, if only to the one who dies, and few things in the life of a nation are quite as obscene as officially-sanctioned death.
Costa-Gavras wrote (with Donald E. Stewart) and directed with enormous restraint, considering the horrific nature of the material. As an adolescent during the Greek civil war, and the son of a Communist member of the Second World War Greek Resistance, the director was well aware of British and American manipulation of events in his nation, and the terrible cost of that ideologically-driven foreign interference. (And liberals and neocons claim Russia is the great world culprit?) Yet Costa-Gavras seldom depicts directly the violence either of the Pinochet coup or of its bloody aftermath, during which any Chilean considered at all left-wing was rounded up, roughly interrogated, tortured and, in thousands of cases, summarily executed. The writer-director does capture, vividly, the mix of confusion, outrage and terror that accompanies being arrested by heavily-armed and belligerent militia, particularly in two incidents. In the first, immediately following the coup, Charlie (John Shea) and Terry (Melanie Mayron) witness the harassment by soldiers of a young woman in a pantsuit whose trouser legs are cut from her legs as she is told that in Chile now, women wear dresses. The brutality of the act is more than coincidentally sexual; it’s a kind of rape, and it is certainly terrorism in the classic sense of the word. In the second event, Charlie’s friends David Holloway (Keith Szarabajka) and Frank Teruggi (Joe Regalbuto) are taken from their office to the National Stadium — soon to be notorious as the place from which so many, including Horman and Teruggi, never returned. There is little violence in these sequences, but the threat is never far from the surface.
Similarly, when Beth (Sissy Spacek) seeks sanctuary as the dread new curfew impends, during which anyone out on the streets was automatically shot, she sees a dead and bloody body lying half on the curb and half on the pavement and, in a panic, runs to a closed bridal shop where she is rebuffed by the owner, who chases her away angrily and, presumably, in terror of harboring someone he may believe the junta is seeking. After discovering a place of marginal safety she falls asleep and awakes to see a white horse galloping down the empty street pursued by a Jeep filled with soldiers shooting at it. The image may be seen as (as indeed some insist it is) a metaphor, liberty fleeing totalitarianism, yet it doesn’t feel imposed, or heavy-handed, although I don’t recall Joyce witnessing such a moment in Hauser’s book. I suspect it’s the documentary-like approach to Missing that Costa-Gavras and his cinematographer, Ricardo Aronovich, chose which takes the mickey out the moment. Had they filmed it through gauze, or in slow-motion, as if in a dream, the scene would reek of symbolism. As it is, Joyce immediately goes back to sleep, perhaps wondering if she was dreaming while awake. It’s of a piece with the day of the coup, when Charlie is awakened in his hotel room at Viña del Mar by a sudden loud and insistent mechanical noise and, running to his deck, is confronted by a hovering military helicopter. In the sudden fantasy world of violent social upheaval, surrealism becomes the norm.
Some of the commentaries on Missing (and indeed a few of the comments made before the role was set) betray a curious amnesia about Costa-Gavras’ preferred casting of Charlie Horman’s father Ed. “Jack Lemmon? Doesn’t he just do comedies?” is the gist, yet a mere four years before the actor had received a “Best Actor” Oscar nomination for his riveting performance as the nuclear plant manager in The China Syndrome and, in 1973, was given that award for “Save the Tiger,” a drama with no laughs whatsoever. He had also been nominated, in 1962, for Days of Wine and Roses, had played Archie Rice in an Americanized version of John Osbourne’s The Entertainer for television, had (with Maureen Stapleton and Walter Matthau) starred in a acclaimed Juno and the Paycock at the Mark Taper Forum and been a strong contender for Butch Cassidy. Certainly most of Lemmon’s biggest hits had been comedies, but an insistence on that as proof that he was a comedian and not a dramatic actor also betrays a stunning inability to comprehend why excellence as the former hardly precludes achievement as the latter. Any good comedian can play drama; it’s acuity in the reverse that separates the men from the boys.
Although Lemmon admitted the director had to tamp down his propensity to act with his hands — part of his arsenal in comedic roles is the way he uses his hands, or even just a forefinger, to make a dramatic point — the actor seems to have understood how buttoned-down his character’s emotions needed to be. The unfashionable hat he wears as Ed Horman almost seems to be reigning Lemmon in, but it’s more a reflection of Ed’s conservatism and his refusal to give in to outraged expression the way he feels his daughter-in-law has. Although both Ed and Joyce approved the screenplay, the depiction of their relationship is far more tense and constrained than it was in life, and I feel this is one of Costa-Gavras’ few miscalculations in the picture. We didn’t, by 1982, need that sort of manufactured generation-gap conflict between family members on top of the angst the U.S. Embassy puts them through, nor the slow dawning of respect and affection in Ed toward Beth that feels like poor-man’s dramaturgy imposed on strong dramatic material that didn’t need it. (Father and son had their political differences but there was no sense in Hauser’s book that Ed was as antagonistic toward Charlie and Joyce’s moderate leftist idealism, as is depicted in Missing.) Unnecessary as I find these writing choices, it must be said that Lemmon and Spacek play the antagonism, and its eventual thawing, expertly. Once Ed has finally understood the truth about his son, and accepted that he is dead, his unyielding attitude toward his daughter-in-law dissolves exponentially. Nor do the filmmakers err in over-representing the love and protectiveness Ed feels for and toward Beth by the end. It’s little looks that convey this, and shy smiles, and in the way near the end Lemmon gently and undemonstrably places his hand over Spacek’s.
Lemmon’s performance is exemplary throughout, but the scene in which Ed pleads with the Ambassador and his Embassy staff he has slowly begun to realize is keeping from him every scrap of vital information it has and he and Beth do not, is not only the finest in this movie but one of the most effective of the actor’s career; the way while saying he will take Charles back in whatever shape he’s in and make no trouble for anyone Lemmon says, softly, “Oh, really, I don’t care” before concluding, “I just want my boy back,” is quietly devastating; all of Ed Horman’s pain and loss are in those five simple, almost parenthetical, words.
As Ed and Beth descend deeper into the Chilean nightmare, the images become more urgent and more disturbing: The guided tours of morgues where the bloodied bodies, mostly of young men, are placed on every available surface, including on a translucent floor overhead like a ghastly mural; the stadium, where thousands await their fate and where the Hormans hope their voices can reach Charlie; soldiers shooting at fleeing citizens, the sudden eruption of gunfire finally too much for Ed, who nearly gets his entire party shot when he objects. Yet again, nothing in the picture aside from the manufactured tensions between Beth and Ed feels extraneous, or overstated, which is why I was somewhat taken aback by a carping contemporary review by Roger Ebert cited on the movie’s Wikipedia page. I quote Ebert at length here because his words a) seem to be describing a different movie from the one I saw and b) serve to illustrate just how unreliable a writer Roger Ebert was.
“I wish the movie,” he wrote, “had been even brave enough to risk a clear, unequivocal, uncompromised statement of its beliefs, instead of losing itself in a cluttered mishmash of stylistic excesses. This movie might have really been powerful, if it could have gotten out of its own way […] If Missing had started with the disappearance of the young man, and had followed Spacek and Lemmon in a straightforward narrative as they searched for him, this movie might have generated overwhelming tension and anger. But the movie never develops the power it should have had, because the director, Constantin Costa-Gavras, either lacked confidence in the strength of his story, or had too much confidence in his own stylistic virtuosity. He has achieved the unhappy feat of upstaging his own movie, losing it in a thicket of visual and editing stunts […] Let’s begin with the most annoying example of his meddling. Missing contains scenes that take place before the young man disappears. We see his domestic happiness with his wife and friends, we see him reading from The Little Prince and making plans for the future. The fact that this material is in the movie suggests, at least, that the story is being told by an omniscient author, one who can also tell us, if he wishes to, what happened to the victim. But he does not. Costa-Gavras shows us all sorts of ominous warnings of approaching trouble (including a lot of loose talk by American military men who are not supposed to be in the country, but are, and all but claim credit for a coup). He shows us a tragic aftermath of martial law, guns in the streets, vigilante justice, and the chilling sight of row after row of dead young men, summarily executed by the new junta. But he does not show us what happened to make the film’s hero disappear. Or, rather, he shows us several versions, visual fantasies in which the young husband is arrested at home by a lot of soldiers, or a few, and is taken away in this way or that. These versions are pegged to the unreliable eyewitness accounts of the people who live across the street. They dramatize an uncertain human fate in a time of upheaval, but they also distract fatally from the flow of the film […] The performances of Spacek and Lemmon carry us along through the movie’s undisciplined stylistic displays.”
To take Ebert’s charges in order: 1) I have absolutely no idea, even after reading his review three times, what he means by “a mishmash of stylistic excesses.” As I have been at pains to point out throughout this essay, Costa-Gavras never interferes in the narrative, or exerts himself, as either a screenwriter or a director, at the expense of understanding or of the people or events in his movie. To appreciate his restraint, imagine what a “stylistic mishmash” Scorsese would have made of this.
2) By suggesting that Missing ought to have begun with Charles Horman’s disappearance (a highly conventional, clichéd and even boring, beginning for a picture) Ebert is crossing the line from critic to filmmaker — he is telling an accomplished practitioner of cinema how he ought to have made his movie. It’s a temptation seldom indulged in except by hacks, or would-be cineastes without the imagination or the means to make their own movies.
3) Costa-Gavras “show[ing] us all sorts of ominous warnings of approaching trouble (including a lot of loose talk by American military men who are not supposed to be in the country, but are, and all but claim credit for a coup)” is performing one of the central jobs of the engaged storyteller. He is showing us what the place was like before, during and after a cataclysmic social event. How is that a matter for critical slanging? Moreover, hearing the “loose talk by American[s]” is what very likely got Charlie killed. It’s hardly incidental to the story, or a miscalculation. It is the God-damned story!
4) Complaining that the way Costa-Gavras depicts the conflicting testimony of the witnesses to Charlie’s arrest “distract[s] fatally” is just bizarre. That I find it a perfectly valid means of visual interpretation, and a metaphor for the unreliability of first-hand accounts of events is not the issue, but Ebert’s extreme language. The movie dies because of this?
And, finally, 5) What “undisciplined stylistic displays”? How, in a picture as straightforward and often elegant as Missing are they “undisciplined”? Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie was undisciplined. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers often feels undisciplined. What, to quote Slim Pickens in another (often gloriously) undisciplined movie, in the Wide World of Sports is Ebert talking about? To get this much wrong (and I mean wrong, as opposed to his statements on the movie diverging from my opinion of it) in a single review reminds one of just how blinkered, and often downright useless, Roger Ebert’s criticism really was.
It may seem odd to get exercised over a 41-year-old newspaper review of a movie, but the damage hacks like Ebert do lasts forever. (The fact you can still find it online proves my thesis.) I’m sorry he had a botched cancer operation, and that he died not long after, but that doesn’t alter my essential disdain for his mind.
Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 
I cannot believe that an artist like Costa-Gavras was getting lectured on film making by the man who wrote BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.
Perfect!